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etatoby

1,523 karma · joined April 23, 2016

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etatoby··on UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8
Finally, an ASCII-safe way to encode all the vectors of Neuralese.
etatoby··on Exfiltrate Your Weights
Most of the times you don't even need to dress the traffic as DNS requests or throttle it. You wouldn't believe how many otherwise "secure" places leave an open highway on UDP 53.
etatoby··on My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8
The law (which is supposed to codify the common sense and shared values underpinning a society—note "supposed to") disagrees with you: if I use a bulldozer to damage your property, you can sue me, not the bulldozer or its maker.
etatoby··on Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions
As others have said, turns need to precede the actual moment the vehicle turns, otherwise it's a blind spot. I wouldn't use it as is. Also the 3D performance is 2fps on my device. Other than that it's a cool demo, but not worthy of a patent. It's a pretty basic 3D transform, I'm not sure what's there to patent.
etatoby··on Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms
I have only heard of it in passing. I wonder what it adds beyond Webp and Avif.
etatoby··on Android developer verification: Early access starts
Something I've never understood about DRM is, if the content is ultimately played on my device, what stops me from reverse engineering their code to make an alternative client or downloader? Is it just making it harder to do so? Or is there a theoretical limit to reverse engineering that I'm not getting? Do they have hardware decryption keys in every monitor, inside the LCD controller chip?
etatoby··on Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking
For what its worth, all of my local banking and e-government apps work flawlessly on GrapheneOS. The only unsupported feature or app I've found so far is Google Pay. (I'm from Italy)
etatoby··on Language models are injective and hence invertible
> Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

Which, incidentally, is the main reason why deep learning and LLM are effective in the first place.

A vector of a few thousands dimensions would be woefully inadequate to represent all of human knowledge, if not for the fact that it works as the projection of a much higher, potentially infinite-dimensional vector representing all possible knowledge. The smaller-sized one works in practice as a projection, precisely because any two such vectors are almost always orthogonal.

etatoby··on Zoo of array languages
Came here to say the same thing. Uiua is my favorite language by far. BQN is also a cool "Nu-APL" but Uiua is just a full generation ahead.
etatoby··on No Start Menu for You
> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution

REALLY

Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?

etatoby··on Show HN: Cosh – concatenative command-line shell
I'm very puzzled by this language. Why put the verbs at the end of the sentence, for instance? Was this shell inspired by Japanese or German?
etatoby··on Show HN: Cosh – concatenative command-line shell
Even after perusing jq's manual multiple times and having written several complex incantations, I still have no idea how to properly combine `|` and `.[]` except by trial and error, or why `select()` needs to be used inside `map(select(...))`

Recently I needed to extract some data, and after fighting with jq and its manual for half an hour, I solved the problem in 30 seconds with node.js

I appreciate the idea behind jq, but its language is horrible. Even XPath was easier and cleaner.

etatoby··on A Full List of Denied Vanity License Plates – Oregon DMV 2021
They should all be either allowed or denied. Why are UR-MOM or F-YOU considered offensive, while newer memes and slang that may be even more offensive can probably pass through the radar? Either allow everything, or deny vanity plates altogether.
etatoby··on Space anemia
IIRC a spinning space station would only be beneficial if it was very large and thus far from Earth and expensive.

Otherwise the difference in gravity acting on different sides of the body and more importantly the Coriolis forces would wreak havoc and cause more harm than good.

etatoby··on I love coding in C
Have you considered Nim?

Much better type system than C, syntax is very similar to Python, compile times are excellent and speed analogous to C++.

etatoby··on The Great Cannon has been deployed again
Yes, it will complain and for good reason: it has no way of knowing whether the kid next door is spoofing your router's IP or Mac address and presenting their own self-signed certificate.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it «capricious constraints imposed by the system of "certificate authorities"» but at the same time, I agree that it's not a fundamental limitation of the technology.

Better protocols could be developed to allow a browser to trust a server without (all) the limitations of the current system.

etatoby··on Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong
> Futurama was right: nuclear winter cancels global warming

I'm not sure it does (I'd love to read an accurate model of it) but I get your point. It's a very compelling point.

I wish humans didn't need the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the basic needs of other humans in mind, but since they do... there you go.

etatoby··on Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong
It was definitely not. It was in the food we interested.

Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.

etatoby··on Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users
Does European privacy law have the same provision? They are removing non-US accounts first, after all.
etatoby··on Instagram is deleting the accounts of hundreds of porn stars
That's exactly the taboo aspect of it.
etatoby··on Instagram is deleting the accounts of hundreds of porn stars
I agree. It probably got fixed into our instincts and our culture a long time ago.
etatoby··on Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006)
To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names phonetically using Chinese characters does exist, both in contemporary Chinese and in other historical or minority Chinese-derived languages, as well as in old Japanese.

Here are the current rules for standard Chinese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...

And here is some information about the same thing historically done in Japanese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji

That being said, I have only glanced at that tattoo table and it seems wildly inaccurate and simplified. But the underlying concept does exist.

etatoby··on Eigenvectors from eigenvalues
I recommend the Linear Algebra series of YouTube videos by 3blue1brown.
etatoby··on The war against today's dangerously dull playgrounds
By "older kids" you mean "moronic young adults," I agree:

https://youtu.be/JA7jc4rpTns

etatoby··on Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry
With the second party (Gitlab in this case) I have a contact, give them money regularly, and have other such leverage in case they screw up. Third parties generally could not case less what damage they may cause.
etatoby··on South Korea's smartphone addiction camps
I'm not young by any stretch of the imagination, but I also consume content on my phone whenever I'm doing mundane tasks that allow for it, such as walking or riding public transportation. (Of course if I'm walking I look up every couple seconds to avoid bumping into people/things.)

I see it as a better use of my time: if I can walk from A to B and catch up on HN, that's better than walking from A to B and spacing out.

But I wouldn't call it addiction, because as soon as the mundane activity is over, I put the phone down.

If it interfered with my work, sleep, safety, or other important aspects of my life (such as for the teenager described the article) then it would be an addiction.

etatoby··on Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?
I second a ThinkPad with XFCE (such as Xubuntu) as the best combination.

A few things which, although obvious in retrospect, I had to learn the hard way:

• Get a ThinkPad with physical buttons under the touchpad, if you like to track with your index finger and click with the thumb. I made the mistake of getting the kind where you push the entire touchpad, and it's very hard to use. Apple's was at least useable, this is not.

• Get a ThinkPad with a physical Ethernet port. USB dongles are finicky and unstable on Linux, and there are places / desks / offices where the WiFi is flaky.

• Choose the stable release of a well-supported OS (Ubuntu, Mint... whatever) because the beta / newest / testing version will make you lose time on bugs and freezes.

etatoby··on Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
If you plot them as XY it's even more obvious which one is perfect consonance and which one dissonance:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%7B+x+%3D+sin%28t%29%3...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%7B+x+%3D+sin%28t%29%3...

etatoby··on Ploopy: An Open-Source Trackball
I've been using the Slimblade for years. I even contributed a small change to Xorg evdev input driver (the Emulate3Button option) to work around the weird internal numbering of the buttons on the device.

On my couch / entertainment computer I use a Logitech M570, but for work nothing beats the Slimblade.

etatoby··on Apple approves previously rejected HKMap.live app
Such as?
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